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One issue on which I always wonder is the usefulness of courses like these. Business models and the Internet, sounds too good to be useful man.
High technology is always emerging and one with good business fundamentals would understand net business models in a giffy. Other hand, people with poor basics in economics and finance are very vulnerable when it comes to doing business in the Net, because they dont understand the core concepts of value addition, transaction costs and resources. In this context, dont you think b-schools should concentrate more on fundamental economics/finance/marketing etc? I wonder how you guys manage to grasp the fundamental theory and learn to apply it also, in just one year of the course.. Amazing indeed.

I had the same scepticism when I saw the course name, but then decided to audit it, given it was being offered by a top class faculty from Wharton... Im glad that I did for I realised judging a course by its name is like judging the book by its cover...

The whole concept of an elective is to build on your basics into something you want to explore more... "Business models and the Internet" was exactly that... It was building on the basics in Microeconomics, strategy, marketing and operations... the concept of the course was to build on what we had learnt in the core courses and see how these change and can be exploited thanks to the arrival of the Internet...

The course was hardly about technology but all about strategy on the internet, marketing and operations...

marketing was primarily dealing with price discovery models afforded by the internet, like auctions, reverse auctions, dynamic pricing and how traditional business models can benefit from these, in both B2C and B2B, and under what situations... (numerous examples)... without the basics of microecons, like revenue equivalence theorem and vickery auctions, degrees of price discrimination, we could not have made head or tail out of this stuff...

strategy was dealing with revenue models, like revenue sharing (classic example: rentrack in the US) and evolution of revenue models in B2B transactions (tracking priceline.com's model) etc.

operations was dealing with transactional efficiences, market efficiences and supply chain efficiencies and the varying degrees with which these can be implemented and used to add value... The reasons why "click and mortar" is useful than a pure play internet model and how it should be used...

It was indeed a takeaway to know that while many in the world are trying to improve only the transactional and market efficiencies, which are easier compared to improving supply chain efficiencies, maximum value is obtained by improving the supply chain's efficiency... So was it when one of our class presentations brought out the point that in "click and mortar" strategies, the value offered by "warehousing" is more in immature markets and value offered by "store picking" is more in mature markets... Now, it may seem a simple case of demand aggregation, but then, the counter intuitive point is that being tempted into a pure play internet strategy in an immature market with tie ups with established suppliers is a mistake... u may like to circumvent the demand uncertainity but then, the value offered by just the transactional efficiency and the downside of supply chain inefficiency result in a net negative effect... it was reassuring to see all this with a activity based cost breakup...

I guess it is critical to know how and when to apply which of these strategies to your business when it decides to adopt the Internet or is already doing so... I have a starting point of thought and an intuition about what leads where before I can decide my marketing or operations strategy will be... If u still think all this stuff is pretty obvious, the force is with you...

In fact, there were occasions when I felt my years of work ex was playing a part in the learning... I completed my engineering in 99, the time when the Internet was growing in India and was every techie's fascination... I worked my way through the dot com boom and bust and read a lot about all these dot com business models, primarily becase the bust hit my company hard and I wanted to know what actually happened... apart from the fact that the stock market and the snowballing scepticism among the VCs had a part to play, many of these models intrigued me... I have thought and thought and thought so much about pure play Internet businesses and came to my own conclusion that atleast a click and mortar strategy is needed to succeed... it was indeed gratifying to see all my thoughts discussed. I was actually developing on those thoughts in the class discussions and it was indeed enjoyable...

Now, if the question is how someone can manage to do the fundamentals well enough and then apply them as well in one year, I guess its just that we slog it out that much more given the short time...